This dissertation examines the acquisition of a
phenomenon that lies at the
interface of logic and grammar.
Polarity-sensitive items (PSIs), including
negative polarity items (NPIs) such as English
'any', are often
characterized by their restricted distribution,
and analyzed in terms of
their licensing condition (compare 'John
doesn’t have any books', where
'any' is licensed by negation, with the
unlicensed *'John has any books').
'Any' moreover oscillates between NPI uses and
so-called ‘free choice’ uses
('John may choose any book'). While a small
handful of previous acquisition
studies on English 'any' have targeted
children’s knowledge of the
licensing condition, no previous study has
systematically investigated
children’s knowledge of the complex underlying
semantics of PSIs like
'any', let alone the question of how children
are to reconcile the dual
nature of 'any'. The series of studies in this
dissertation presents novel
evidence from experiments and corpora
demonstrating that children have
incredibly sophisticated semantic knowledge of
'any', which includes the
ability to generate subdomain alternatives, to
(pre-)exhaustify these
alternatives, to perform domain widening, and
to compute so-called free
choice inferences. Yet samples of parental
spontaneous production reveal
very little evidence that could inform the
learner as to how to carry out
the semantic operations required for adult-like
interpretation of 'any'. I
propose that the solution to this learning
problem lies in innately
constraining the hypothesis space of PSI types.
Such a restricted
hypothesis space is available to us in the form
of a generative typology
put forth in Chierchia (2013), an analysis that
derives the possible
classes of PSIs on the basis of free variation
along two dimensions: the
kind of alternatives that the target PSI
activates, and the mode of
exhaustification that factors the alternatives
into meaning. On the
assumption that these two dimensions are
innately specified, only a finite
set of PSI types can be generated; I discuss
how the learner might use
'any'’s unique distributional properties in the
input to map the string
'any' to the target PSI within the typology of
restricted options.